Handy Patriawan’s Blog

I was watching Aza Raskin’s presentation about reducing user interactions.

Aza presented some interesting ideas. One way to reduce interactions is to make things to work automatically. For example, he showed how an RSS reader automatically loads additional data once the user reaches the end of the page, thus the user just needs to keep scrolling to see more news.

Another example is to use various gestures to interact with zooming in and out of a calendar.

If you’re remotely interested in Information Architecture (IA) or user interface design, do yourself a favor and spend about an hour to see the presentation.

One more thing… Aza did his presentation in Firefox!

I found a good website that I can use to compare fonts.

Even better, Typetester website allows me to download the CSS!

There are three different sections to display different font formats including size, alignment, color, background color (among other settings).

Once you have selected the formatting, scrolling down will reveal the fonts in various styles (e.g. regular, bold, italic).

Good website to bookmark!

I’ve been working on integrating AJAX into my project. It wasn’t easy, but I got the data to load dynamically.
Depending on how much data to load, it may take a while especially over a slow connection (or an overloaded server). It is a good practice to have some progress indicator.
I found a really cool website that can help to build the progress indicator.
Even better, the images are free for use!

Feel free to post other websites that offer the same feature.

I am sure at some point web applications will require an entry form.

I just notice that Rails does not make the ‘Reset’ button available. Here is an example of an HTML form with a reset button:

Google helps me again!

I found a post from mc-kenna.com to describe what needs to be done.

<%= submit_tag "Start over", :name => ‘reset’, :type => ‘reset’, :id => ‘task_reset’ %>

Upon further research, I found an interesting discussion/ticket about making the reset button available in Rails. Making the button available is considered as a bad practice.

The ticket refers to Jacob Nielsen’s useit.com. A little blurb:

The Web would be a happier place if virtually all Reset buttons were removed. This button almost never helps users, but often hurts them.

I agree with the opinion that the button should be removed!

There is a good usability guidelines document that one can read from w3.org.

It is not a long document but it is a dense one and contains good guidelines. For example, “Don’t rely on color alone.”

It is worth an hour (or more) of your time if you are into web design and usability.

I know I will put this in my future reading.

I recently purchased Bulletproof Web Design book and I like it!

I am still learning CSS and this book take my learning to a different level. There are some techniques in the book that I actually use already (ehm… sidebar).

I am a fan of fluid website design and Dan Cederholm (the book author) shows how it can be done.

I highly recommend the book!

I’ve updated the sidebar to be a bit nicer.

I’m planning of improving my theme a little bit at a time with various techniques that I observe and learn from other websites and books.

I’m beginning to enjoy web design now.

I just noticed that my theme passes the W3C CSS validation!

I can also easily validate my future themes easily.

Update: My theme also passes the W3C HTML validation!

Having a good user interface is very important for our websites and I have one new website design guideline.

If the user is expected to enter any data, we want to make sure that we set the focus appropriately on the right data field (e.g. text box or check box).

Setting the focus is very easy as well, so there is no good excuse if a website does not implement this feature.
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